your no comments

i'm writing to you
yes i'm writing to you

and your no post a comment
and your no post a comment
and your no post a comment
and your no post a comment
and you post no comments

and I'm writing to you
and i'm writing to you
and i'm writing to you
and i'm writing to you
and i'm writing to you.
and your no post a comment

yes i'm lousy
yes i'm lousy
yes i'm lousy
yes i'm lousy
yes i'm lousy

and you are the writer
and you are the writer
and you are the writer

but you'll comment to them
and you'll comment to them
you comment to them


fed up
fed up
fed up
fed up


and they all comment
and they all comment
and they all comment
and they all comment
and they all comment

and they get it
all of them get it
and i get that they get it
and you get that i get it

and your no post a comment

follow up visit

who stepped on you and cut you with poison

hungry cry baby nurses on the last pocket of gland

wetting itself

gushing heart held high

eat it

coo

nurse your autonomy

but nurse nurse nurse

drink all cuddle glass in the mouth broken pins

to watch

watch it then strychnine coma

fur and noise under magnifying glass curls up shrink, poof, gone,

sun another!

I handed you

re edit, paste, bake, cough, hate

what a lovely kitty

and they're all like you

shell hard reptile roses

sweet pretty roses spit

each and every one identical in empty eyes

reptile brain hose

all must eat

each other not

crusty plankton by the ton does not fill

touching it now withers

I want for you

is what happened when she was 12

but never will

want for you shmuffin

off road wet blueberry dough still burning ash

it must be time

shit I'm late

in order

what can it come to mean?

who is not really it and the face is lost

it can't be true if when he was who he was,

then was not who he was, was who she did so not see,

and she so did not, and she said it and insisted so, on and on,

look away and she did it again, said it to a stranger

why must they be right -when due- looked best?

arrivaled, luggaged, smile on time

the rhyming sweating metal text

it hurts my teeth

fungal tell, body language lying cream enbombed

all fastenered, buckles, wrinkle leather straps and visa

I waited for my dream

in line with others

in order

prick pointy kissing

it's on baby

fish smellish green and muscle chemicals togethered

not fuck

and then a drop of blood

welcome a doily wrapped in soiled piss

or welcome

dragon

Last week I moved my work space out of the living room and into a small room on the 2nd floor of our house. Today I'm clearing stuff out and setting it all up so I can work up here. I'm very happy to have a private space again. I was in the living room and could never do any work because of needing to keep things tidy and hidden too, I draw boobs and stuff, for some privacy. It wasn't working at all. Now it's better and I'm looking forward to getting going again more on my own terms. It's necessary but, I didn't see it. It's a good change. Need to find a job too. It cost us a lot for me to focus on art so long.

Paula loves the new living room. She hangs out there with her laptop, writing and surfing, and she smiles a lot more.

what drawings!

We walked to the AGO today, Paula and I in -9. We saw Gillray and Goya and Oh it was wonderful. A show of prints titled 'Humor That Bites'. I guess you can call drawings that made people want to imprison and kill them something like that. Although now it's more like 'Not So Funny Anymore Art That Once Bit'. But really it was such wildly wonderful work! And I'll be going back again a few more times just to sit surrounded in every direction by this fantastic stuff. I'm going to draw there like I'm in a coffee shop with them.

a swallow

I haven't posted here in a long time. For the last year I've mostly been drawing with a brush pen. Mostly in coffee shops. Pentel makes the best brush pen. It's an exquisitely sweet tool. Doesn't leak and the flow is perfectly predictable. The Toronto Coffee Company on Lansdowne makes a great coconut latte. It's thick and has some vanilla. They're new in our neighborhood. Very nice people too.

Mostly I go with Paula. We're doing quite badly right now. With love evaporating and leaving stains, like salty sweat marks on old baseball caps. I wish I knew what the connection was between the work I do and the life I live. I can't really find it. Maybe if I can try to write and draw on the same days, for many days, maybe I'll find the link. I draw in very different ways without any understanding of why. These different styles.

I know that when I turn to drawing I'm usually trying to find my way back to a state of grace, because I'm in pain. I don't think I approach the work with something to say. I just want to feel connected again. To anything. Even to paper. Once I get there I feel safe.

collaborators

Me and Mark Connery went out together drawing on Thursday. I thought we were just going to lurk and sketch. I love drawing people doing anything. Mark had a whole other idea and it was really fun. He's a pro at this. We just passed the drawings back and forth and got to know each other chatting away and making marks.

The waitress was really sweet at this University pub we settled in at. She left us alone for long periods of time and was delighted we were doing something interesting. I told her these were plans for a bank heist and we needed some input. The place was practically empty when we arrived about 7:30 pm, but it slowly filled up. And got shrieky noisy, due to an adjacent co-ed. The cell phone reception was bad in this place for some strange reason. The closer you got to the urinals the worse it got. Mark's long distance East Coast romance and he had a long distance call date to connect their long distance hearts. The bad reception ruined it.

It was bitter cold that Thursday. Mark said that when he went out to smoke the pub's music changed outside. Like there were 2 mixes. I wondered if one was to attract you in, and another was for when you were in. Like a secret society shunning unwanted patrons. Mark does mixing so he's really aware of the ambient noise in a way I'm kind of oblivious. When we left the pub he tried to demonstrate the differences. But it didn't reoccur. We shook hands and parted. Now I have 3 of the 6 drawings we did together. We flipped a coin and picked like kids making teams. I got all the ones with lots of Mark's work and I think he sort of did the opposite with his 3. We like each others styles.

words by paula drawing by larry

Larry said let’s go to Starbucks and you’ll write about someone we see and I’ll draw them. And I said, yeah like that loud guy we always see there talking to someone new every time, we can do him. Then we got there and sure enough he was there. But I don’t think he’s a bum.

One time we were sitting down with him and talking to him and our twelve year old son Jacob was with us and he was warning Jacob to always listen to his parents, us, because he knew. And Jacob was buying a new cell phone from earning money from shovelling snow and he was telling Jacob which guy to talk to in the Rogers for any problems he might have. And then he noticed my cell phone and said, oh yeah, the little chocolate bar, which is a good way to describe it, it’s very thin, and that he used to have the same one. Then he showed us the cell phone he has now and then the other cell phone he also has now.

So I was ordering Larry and me our coffees and he left his chair and was beside me telling me how there’s e-bay cards on the internet for seven hundred dollars, how he couldn’t believe they were for seven hundred dollars, then he showed me his Paul McCartney Starbucks card and said he looked it up and it was only worth one dollar. Which didn’t seem right to him.

I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. But I had to agree his Paul McCartney Starbucks card did look very nice. It was much more unique-looking than my Starbucks card. And feel sorry for Paul McCartney that his value was so low in whatever internet assessing plastic card world he was talking about.

But I didn’t ask him what he was talking about because I didn’t want to talk to him even though one time we had been sitting down together and the audiences of each other.

For once the pair of comfy soft purple chairs had become available – people were getting up and leaving them - and Larry grabbed them. What I said about their availability he responded to with more commentary.

I sneezed hard two times and he said bless you, you could tell it was bless you, but in a language I don’t know, it sounded like Yiddish, in his same loud voice that cut through the coffee shop and reverberated, two times too.

iggy and lilu

Our 2 kittens wished Paula a Happy Mothers Day.

i submit

So I've done a lot of drawings over the last 10 months since I lost my job as a teacher when the Art Institute of Toronto expired. This month I've put together a portfolio site and I'm going to send e-mails to galleries here in Toronto by way of submitting my work. I've never had representation before as an artist except as an illustrator and that had some positive aspects. Wish me luck please. Cheers all. The site address is www.larryeisenstein.com

baby kittens

We have 2 new kittens. Iggy and Lilu. Everything looks cute to me now. I've got cute colored lenses affixed to my glasses and am blinded to the truth that they're just big hairy cockroaches, scuffling in my dinner, sniffing for food everywhere, what mooches. Roachmoochies.

7 of 22

That's how many pages I've got drawn in my accordion book. It's from China and I bought it at Gwartzman's Art Supplies. It's got thick tough paper and took a beating. I've been going downtown to this art supply store since I was 15. That's 40 years. The same guy still owns and runs it. He's as crotchety and imperious as ever. His build is wiry, his features handsome, his speech laconic and he still scares me. Now I go to his son the dentist with my whole family. He makes cracks about his dad while he drills in my cavities.

wrinkle

I use the cheapest paper to work on. I hate to waste good paper. Since I always start every drawing believing it's destiny is abject failure only the crappiest . So my crappy paper goes gnarly and rippled the longer I paint. After 4 weeks of stroking this one has the geography of dessicated parchment. It aged with me so it's not Dorian Gray.

what you feed your mind

So now I understand that I've spent most of my life asking terrible questions. And that the answers my mind has come up with are only appropriate to the negative inquiry.

Now when i go to bed I feed a fresh batch of hopeful, happy questions into my brain and I wake up with excellent answers. Today I feel sure that everything is going to turn out well.
It's a great feeling.

love understands

My eldest son Eli is in northern Israel where he's volunteered to help out in the rear as the war with with Hamas widens. I hope he'll be safe. Eli's mother, my ex-wife, doesn't understand him and rejects his decision to participate in the operation.

He was just at the end of a vacation/tour when the war broke out. He decided to stay. A couple of months ago he met a young Israeli woman traveling here in Toronto. She had just finished her mandatory service in the Israeli Army. I think they're in love. Eli and Nofair are going to rendezvous in Israel in February. The ongoing conflict will be the backdrop. I guess there's a very romantic story there. I'm worried for him, but it's his time to be a young man in the world now.

happy sad

I must cry for 2008 though. It was the best year of my life. I'm a capricorn. We start out old and get younger. Each year of my life seems to be getting better lately. This last one was my favorite. So I grieve because it's over and I'm worried it will never be as good again. But so far 2009 is even better!

happy new year

2009 spurts of splorching gobs of joyous creamy love to you!

I've been away, in a depression. Now I'm feeling better. I'm sorry I dissappeared. I miss being here. Be safe and happy and healthy for the next 12 months and then we'll ask for the exact same thing again.

what?

flic

more visitors campaign

Over the next little while I am shamelessly going to introduce more sex and violence to my postings in an effort to solicit more visits and (especially) comments. We hope our regular visitors (Pennies, Orange and Sinister - I love you) will not be disappointed.